In this paper, three modified Polak-Ribière-Polyak (PRP) conjugate gradient methods for unconstrained optimization are proposed. They are based on the two-term PRP method proposed by Cheng (Numer. Funct. Anal. Optim. 28:1217-1230, 2007), the three-term PRP method proposed by Zhang et al. (IMA J. Numer. Anal. 26:629-640, 2006), and the descent PRP method proposed by Yu et al. (Optim. Methods Softw. 23:275-293, 2008). These modified methods possess the sufficient descent property without any line searches. Moreover, if the exact line search is used, they reduce to the classical PRP method. Under standard assumptions, we show that these three methods converge globally with a Wolfe line search. We also report some numerical results to show the efficiency of the proposed methods.